By Our Sports Affairs Bureau
INDORE: Indian on Saturday won the 1st test by an Innings and 130 runs against here at Madhab Rao Scindhia Stadium .
With this, India clinched their 10th innings win under Virat Kohli as they crushed Bangladesh. Failing to reduce the 1st-innings deficit of 343, Bangladesh were bundled out for 213.
The Indian pace attack was at its premium best as the trio of Ishant Sharma, Umesh Yadav and Mohammed Shami proved too good for the Bangladeshi batsmen. The ever-present Ravichandran Ashwin too claimed three wickets.
Shami was the pick of the Indian bowlers after a fantastic bowling display in both the innings of the match. He claimed 3 wickets in the first innings and 4 wickets in the second.
Bangladesh: 150 and 213 in 69.2 overs (Mushfiqur Rahim 64; Mohammed Shami 4/31).India 1st innings: 493 for 6 declared in 114 overs (Mayank Agarwal 243, Ajinkya Rahane 86, Cheteshwar Pujara 54; Abu Jayed 4/108).
Virat Kohli said Don’t know what to say (laughs), another clinical performance. Very professional with the bat, playing five batters with one guy taking responsibility is what we want with overseas tours coming up. Hats off to the boys. These guys (our fast bowlers) are on top of their game, when they bowl, it looks like any pitch is a good pitch, Jasprit isn’t here but this is a dream combination for any captain. Having strong bowlers the most important thing in any team. The numbers and records are there for everyone to see, that’ll remain in the books, we haven’t focused on it.
“We’re looking at keeping the standards up, motivating the next lot of players. In that process, we’re pushing up the standards of Indian cricket. We don’t care about numbers at all as a team. The mindset is simple, when you see a young guy coming in to bat, in Tests I know how much time it took me to get those big hundreds, so I know the importance of getting big runs. It’s important as a senior batter to let them know to keep going.
I want them to not make the mistakes I made as a youngsters to make them world class cricketers. The pink-ball Test is going to be exciting, will be a challenge for the batters. With the older ball, it doesn’t swing that much so the bowlers will have a challenge. We’re just happy to be among the first to play pink-ball cricket for India. The crowd has been brilliant, these guys give us the extra motivation to push extra when we’re tired.
Mominul Haque: Toss definitely impacted the outcome, it’s been difficult. We won and decided to bat, was a difficult decision. I have a lot of positives, especially Abu Jayed who picked four wickets. Mushfiqur was superb with the bat in both innings, Liton did well too. The top order batsmen had a challenge against a very good bowling line-up, so we need to try and play out 15-20 overs. We have no experience of Day-Night Test cricket, we’ll just try and enjoy that game.
India’s fast-bowling trio just had a fascinating small conversation with Harsha Bhogle on Star Sports. We’ll try and get the video for you very soon, but a lot of it has the potential to be lost in translation, if we just put up the English transcript. The presentation is coming up very soon.
